Painting

Painting, depiction by means of line and color of a subject, rendered representationally or abstractly, on a 2-dimensional surface. The art of painting dates from more than 20,000 years ago, with cave paintings of animals and hunters, to ancient Egyptian tomb paintings, Cretan celebratory paintings on buildings, and the painted pottery of the Greeks. The Romans were the first to paint lifelike figures in perspective with depth, shade, and shadow. Asian painting includes the religious paintings of India, a means of communicating with the gods; Chinese painting, related to calligraphy, expressing a deep love of nature; and Islamic painting, primarily the elegant calligraphy and illustrations of books. Medieval painting (300s–1300s) centered on Christianity as its source of inspiration and was expressed in paintings lacking perspective and using symbols to tell stories.

Italian painting (1300–1600)

Giotto's fresco works broke away from Byzantine art with his realistic depiction of people and their emotions. His monumental, sculptural style was generally followed in 14th-century Florence. In Siena, the decorative linear style of Duccio and Simone Martini prevailed. The Florentine discovery of linear perspective was first employed by Masaccio, and the tradition was continued by Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca, and Botticelli. Western painting reached an apogee in the High Renaissance works of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Mannerism, developed by Giulio Romano and Andrea del Sarto, influenced the arresting style of El Greco. From the mid-15th century a distinct Venetian school emerged, notable for its use of color. The most influential Venetian artists were Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

Painting outside Italy (1400–1600)

Flemish art was finely detailed, as in the work of Jan Van Eyck who, with his brother Hubert, created innovative oil paintings. A more emotional style was developed by Rogier Van der Weyden, while Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel developed grotesque fantasy pictures. In the late 15th century, German art became influential with Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts and engravings, Mathias Grünewald's Isenheim Altar piece, and Hans Holbein's portraits.

Painting (1600–1850)

The prominent artists of the baroque period were the Italian painter Caravaggio; the brilliant and imaginative Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens; the Spaniard Diego Velázquez; the classical French painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain; Dutchman Rembrandt van Rijn; and the Dutch painters Jan Steen and Jan Vermeer, who specialized in genre scenes. The rococo style was characterized by elegant, sensuous, often frivolous works by painters like Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. English portraiture was developed by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, influencing the first important American artists, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West. The Spanish rococo painter, Francisco Goya, depicted the savagery of the Napoleonic Wars. The first half of the 19th century in France was dominated by the classicism of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and the romanticism of Eugène Delacroix.

Painting since (1850)

Gustave Courbet rendered large-scale pictures of ordinary life and Édouard Manet influenced impressionism. Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste Renoir pioneered painting outdoors and experimented with the effects of light. The postimpressionists Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, through their novel use of paint and simplified forms, greatly influenced expressionism and fauvism. Paul Cézanne's work was crucial to the development of cubism, largely invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Wassily Kandinsky and Casimir Malevich developed forms of abstract art. Surrealism used imagery taken from dreams, such as in the works of Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. In the 1960s pop art was developed by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. A resurgence of interest in various aspects of realism occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.